Austen's Powers: Engaging with Adam Smith in Debates about Wealth and Virtue

Abstract

I argue here that in her novels Austen participates in the longstanding debate about the choice between virtue and commerce, virtue and corruption, virtue and passion, a debate that has been engaged in every phase of Western tradition, [where] there is a conception of virtue-Aristotelian, Thomist, neoMachiavellian, or Marxian-to which the spread of exchange relations is seen as presenting a threat (Pocock 123, 104). As Pocock goes on to explain, the radical contribution that eighteenth-century political economists like Hume and Smith made to this discussion was to argue that the pursuit of wealth could itself be virtuous, providing benefits to commercial society as a whole and to the individuals living within that society. While Smith was perhaps the single most famous advocate for the expansion of commerce, he was also extremely troubled by the effects on the individual of a culture where money was increasingly becoming the dominant social power. As Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff note, it is not an easy task to reconcile his evident distaste for the vulgar materialism of the 'great scramble' of commercial society with his clear endorsement of economic growth (8-9). Smith articulated this ambivalence most powerfully when revising The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1789 after writing The Wealth of Nations to which he added a passage to the effect that the